SlideMagic Blog

The majority of business pitches do not have the entertainment value of a Harry Potter story. It is hard to transform that customer case example where you installed new servers that are 4x faster into a fast-paced, spell-binding campfire story. And no, few people will be interested in the 30 minute mini episode of a “day in the life of” your hypothetical customer in Amsterdam who had a scalability issue.

So what elements of “story telling” can we use in everyday business presentations? Some ideas.

• A sequence or flow that keeps the audience interested to hear the next point. This flow might be completely different from a text book business analysis.
• Some sort of framework, context that keeps the whole thing together. If you use a quantified case example, us the it throughout the presentation to explain different concepts. If you use analogies, keep them comparable.
• Show data points to which the audience can relate to. Per bottle, % of sales, hours saved. Abstract numbers don’t talk
• Slow down in details that are interesting, relevant, have the courage to skip over content that is obvious and or repetitive
• Introduce unexpected transitions, “You think this is obvious, right? Well it isn’t. Did you know that…”

Business presentations can use elements of story telling without having to open with “let me tell you a story…”

Image via WikiPedia

All my clients want that presentation that uses story telling and captivating images to hook its audience emotionally and gets them to sign an investment check right here, right now.

But sometimes that beautiful story is not the issue. Ideas can be pretty simple to describe, the market size easily understood, what is left is the concern that company can actually make it happen.

Business models, cost structures, go-to-market routes, hiring plans, product releases, all “boring stuff” that pretty much only can be captured in McKinsey-style tables. Ah, that annoying presentation designer who keeps on pointing out inconsistencies between the slides.

These cases also highlight why certain companies can do incredibly well in big audience pitch competitions, but fail to raise money from professional investors scrutinizing the details in small conference rooms.

We are celebrating the Jewish new year here in Tel Aviv, and I just returned form a short bike ride around the city, during which I got an interesting idea that could take SlideMagic into an entirely new direction. Something that was staring me in the face for a few years I think, but I did not spot it. Something that is probably not very hard to do technically, but requires my experience and weird combination of skills to get it right. Sorry to be a bit cryptic here!

There is a 3D cube shape in PowerPoint, here is how you can make it transparent. The secret: rotate a copy of itself and paste them over each other.

Image via WikiPedia

People say that in marketing, it is bad to be negative, trashing the competition’s product and/or business. I can see how that makes sense in public advertising. Being the angry company who keeps on kicking others will not help build your brand in the long term.

In closed room sales and investor pitches, I think it is a bit different. You don’t have much time, and the audience across the table might not know the market very well. Stressing your positives and hoping that they will fill in the comparison to the competition might not be enough.

The tone of a presentation does not have to be negative, the differentiation versus the competition should be made very clear. In most cases, there is a positive way to spin this story. Both models have a reason to exist: your product works great for this segment, the other product will work better in that segment.

Even in the consumer market, people are looking for the head on comparisons, even if they are absent in advertising. Product reviews by trusted sources, and online comments by honest consumers, trolls, and competitors impersonating as a reviewer will inform the buying decisions.

For corporate buyers or investors, this back channel to get the real story does not really exist, and/or they do not have the time to find it, so being a bit more explicit might not be that bad.

Increasingly, presentation meetings are about discussing a proposal for investment or a product sale, rather than confronting an audience with an idea for the very first time. People have gotten the basic idea in material they saw beforehand.

So, there is a new role for busy slides, meant for pondering on a desktop screen.

A number of things can make slides busy:

• Too many topics/ideas to cover
• Lots of filler/buzzwords that inflate a simple point into a paragraph of prose
• Complex relationships, dependencies, architectures, pricing models

The first two are a no-go, even for presentations that are meant for reading. The third option however, can be useful. In many cases, it is virtually impossible to visualize a complex timeline or network in a series of slides with pretty pictures and one word on them.

Some guidelines how to design these useful slides crammed with content:

• Think about every word/label you type, can it be shorter, and if so, will we save an entire line?
• Grid, grid, grid: make sure everything lines up with everything where ever possible, this will make the composition calmer on the eye
• Hierarchy: create multiple layers of insight, big bold ones that catch the eye immediately, smaller subtle one for the reader who has more time
• Use color to connect items

Image via WikiPedia

I noticed that among successful investors you will find a lot of introverts. People that don’t mind working in relatively small companies, like to mull things over, don’t get career satisfaction with being the new sales director which can address the entire company at the next sales kick off meeting. Quietly, these investors did some good deals over the years, and as a result managed to raise subsequents funds. (No offense to extravert successful investors, I know many of them as well).

But be sure to take feedback from these type of investors seriously. She might mumble: “the differentiation versus competitor [X] is not clear”, followed by silence. This is not feedback about redrawing the competitor slide, this is not feedback about reshuffling the order of the slides in the deck, this is not an invitation to repeat your 3 arguments one more time (this time a lot louder). This might be well-thought through fundamental objection against investing in your company, she understood your arguments perfectly well, she simply does not believe them.

Sweater featured in the picture seems to originate here.

Apple’s product announcements are probably business presentations with the largest audiences ever and an example for all of us on slide design and stage delivery. Yesterday was no exception: a well-rehearsed performance and great looking slides in minimalist Apple style.

In about 5% of the slides, Apple slipped into the feature list trap though. Whenever it was time to wrap up the presentation of a product, a slide with a beautiful photo appeared, with a list of bullet points appeared, summarizing the features. Phill Schiller was rushing through the list, mentioning certain bullets, skipping others, repeatedly looking down at the stage monitor to keep on script.

Bullet points can happen to the best of us.

“Oh, I just want to pick your brain”, is what clients on a low budget often say. Two things they do not realize: 1) it is hard to add any serious value in 10 minutes, 2) 10 minute conversations never last 10 minutes, especially when in person, 3) taking a creative person out of the workflow for 10 minutes comes at a cost of around 60 minutes.

Here are 4 levels of improvement in a presentation:

1. Quick content check: the main feedback I can give is whether something is missing in your pitch, and/or whether you spend too much time on something that is obvious or not relevant. In most cases it will be hard for a non-professional pitch designer to turn this high level feedback into a better deck
2. A quick template fix: fix fonts, colors, images, alignment. This is work that any designer can do, you can count down the work it takes by the amount of pages, there is no need (and time) to go into what is actually written on the slides
3. Slide-by-slide content fixes. One step further than step 2, I dive in the content, start changing text, layouts, everything, but pretty much on a slide-by-slide basis. Regular designers will struggle here since I am often editing the words of very senior executives in companies here, it requires some background knowledge, but most of all confidence to contradict a CEO. The effort such a project is pretty much driven by the number of pages
4. The full re-do of a pitch, starting from a blank sheet of paper. This is my usual bread and butter work, and is pretty much a fixed time effort: my biggest effort is to understand your particular story. Once I am there, it does not really matter anymore whether I product 20, 30, or 40 slides.

As a professional presentation designer I deal with highly confidential information in almost every presentation I work on. Let’s look at NDAs (non disclosure agreements) from different perspectives.

As a founder, inventor, entrepreneur, you have every incentive to get people to sign an NDA before sharing confidential information. You have this fragile idea that anyone could just steal and replicate. Also, NDAs are important when applying for patents. If someone can prove that your idea was “out in the open” without NDA protection, you could lose your claim as its inventor.

Investors see thousands and thousands of deals in a year. Signing an NDA for each single one of them creates some practical problems. You would have to thoroughly check 4 pages of dense legal text for each one of them, you need to keep track of all the agreements over time in order not to forget the thousands of legal obligations you entered into over the course of 20 years. That is the reason most investors won’t sign an NDA.

Since investors hold the check book, they are in a pretty strong negotiation position versus the inventor. What to do? In most cases it is possible to explain an idea without signing an NDA. Simply leave the very specific bits out of the pitch. When the due diligence process advances, you might have a chance to get the investor to sign later on, as the probability of making an investment increases.

Even if the investor had bad intentions, it is pretty hard to copy a startup idea after glancing through an investor deck. You need to have the required technical know-how, the team, etc. etc. to make it happen. And even if you have all that, you need to put in the sweat to make it actually happen.